The White House billed President Obama's interviews with local reporters Monday as an opportunity to "discuss his vision for reducing our debt and bringing down our deficit, based on the values of shared responsibility and shared prosperity."
But instead Mr. Obama opted to highlight issues like job growth- "we've seen numbers each month" - and blasting the Republican's proposed budget as one that "turns Medicare into a voucher program." When he discussed raising revenue-aka taxes- he stressed it would be "mostly coming from people like me, high income individuals."
Away from the White House press corps, Mr. Obama ultimately yalked less about his new deficit reduction plan and more about his administration's achievements- or about the visiting reporters' children.
In an interview with CBS News Denver affiliate KCNC, the president focused on clean energy and education and rarely used terms like debt or deficit, though he did cite his $2 trillion plan to cut spending as outlined in a speech last week.
"We don't have any magic bullet," Mr. Obama said. "When you've had a recession this bad then it's going to take some time to fix it."
In a run-up to the midterm elections, the president did a series of interviews with local radio and television stations to help fire up the Democratic base. The White House says he isn't yet campaigning, but Monday's interviews were scheduled with stations in states important to the re-election campaign- swing states Colorado and North Carolina, as well as Texas and Indiana.
Obama also has town halls about his deficit reduction plan scheduled in Virginia and Nevada this week, as well as a Facebook town hall in California.
CBS News Radio White House correspondent Mark Knoller pressed Jay Carney in his daily briefing Monday, asking the press secretary if the president thinks "he gets better access to the American people than doing a news conference here?"
"We reach out in numerous ways," Carney said. "It just remains the case that a lot of Americans still get a large amount of their news from local television."
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